Stillbirth Data Analysis Added to Lives Saved Tool

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have added the analysis of stillbirth interventions to the Lives Saved Tool (LiST). LiST is a user-friendly computer program that helps donor agencies and governments make investments in child survival programs for maximum impact. The journal BMC Public Health published the supplement “Technical inputs, enhancements and applications of the Lives Saved Tool (LiST)” containing 36 articles that review and analyze assumptions and methods used in LiST, as well as a number of papers that compare the outputs from LiST to measured mortality reductions. In addition, LiST was used for research on stillbirth intervention published in a special edition of The Lancet. Both journals were published online on April 13.

“A number of new studies are using LiST to examine the impact of interventions on stillbirths where we’ve previously used LiST to analyze the impact of interventions on maternal, neonatal and child mortality,” said Neff Walker, PhD, a senior scientist with the Bloomberg School’s Department of International Health and editor of the BMC Public Health series.

LiST was developed by faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health under the direction of the Child Health Epidemiology Research Group (CHERG), in collaboration with the World Health Organization and UNICEF and with funding by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

Each year, millions of mothers and children die because they do not receive basic care. While it is currently impossible to provide comprehensive care to all of them, LiST shows what interventions have the potential to avert the most deaths. The computer program can provide information for specific countries and regions based on estimates of disease burden and intervention effectiveness.

The BMC Public Health supplement is the second of a series of supplements that provide the theoretical and methodological background of LiST and was edited by Johns Hopkins faculty Monica Fox, Reynaldo Martorell, and Nynke van den Broek, in addition to Walker.

LiST is available for download to researchers at http://www.jhsph.edu/dept/ih/IIP/list/.